Great Ocean Road III: More Ocean Scenery and visiting Diver Dan

In this third and last part, we explore some less popular spots along the Great Ocean Road.

We spent the night at the Clifton Beach Lodge, which has quite a misleading name. I would call it “Bushlands Cottages”, since the lodge consists of a number of small cottages, 5 minutes off the main road. But it might as well be 3 hours away from civilization, one could not tell. As we were about to leave, we heard a couple of interesting bird sounds. I went up a little hill, from where I had a great view into the next hill. The little “bushes” that were decorating the grasslands soon turned out to be kangaroos. Simone stopped counting when she arrived at 100…

We had breakfast in Princetown, a place that makes my home village Rubigen look like a metropolis. Despite the bad weather forecast, it turned out to be quite a nice day with hardly any rain. We revisited the London Bridge, and then drove inland to a place called Timboon, which is home to a small cheese farm. If you ever are in the region, make sure you visit this place; Swiss approved! Their cheese platter was huge and we took half of it with us for later.

Along our way to Warrnambool, which marks the end of the Great Ocean Road, we visited a few other outlooks, which were at least as impressive as the more touristy ones we had visited before.

After a good night’s sleep in Warrnambool, we headed back to Geelong. The 2.5 hour dive was nice and uneventful. Highlight of the day was our visit to Barwon Heads, which is known because of a TV series from the nineties called “SeaChange”; thanks Aria for the tip, we’re big fans. Star of the show is a guy called “Diver Dan”, who lives in a very picturesque boat shed, which we of course visited. Simone had the honour to drive over the famous bridge, which is closed in the TV series.

I highly recommend the Great Ocean Road to everyone. My advice is to rent a car, and spend at least three days there, as there are so many more things to see than the Twelve Apostles. With three months left for our PhDs, this might be the last blog entry for a while. But who knows, we might need another sanity retreat soon…